Showing papers in "Communication Theory in 2020"

Conceptualizing, Organizing, and Positing Moderation in Communication Research

Abstract: Meta-theoretical focus is given to how communication researchers are approaching and hypothesizing moderation. A moderation typology is offered and an evaluation of the field’s common practices for positing moderation reveals an inability to discern between three overarching classifications (Contributory, Contingent, Cleaved). A content analysis of eight communication journals reveals moderation hypotheses lacking a level of precision that can best aid the field’s knowledge generation. In addition, vague hypothesizing is leaving communication researchers vulnerable to the commitment of Type III error (i.e., correctly rejecting a null hypothesis for the wrong reason). Recommendations are provided in an effort to improve the field’s conceptualization and presentation of moderation.

Prophylactic Versus Therapeutic Inoculation Treatments for Resistance to Influence

Abstract: One of the most significant departures from conventional inoculation theory is its intentional application for individuals already “infected”—that is, inoculation not as a preemptive strategy to protect existing positions from future challenges, but instead, inoculation as a means to change a position (e.g., from negative to positive) and to protect the changed position against future challenges. The issue is important for persuasion scholarship in general, as theoretical boundary conditions help at each stage of persuasion research development, serving as a guide for literature review, analysis, synthesis, research design, interpretation, theory building, and so on. It is an important issue for inoculation theory and resistance to influence research, specifically, for it gets at the very heart—and name and foundation—of inoculation theory. This article offers a theoretical analysis of inoculation theory used as both prophylactic and therapeutic interventions and concludes with a set of recommendations for inoculation theory scholarship moving forward.

Organizational Crisis Communication: Suboptimal Crisis Response Selection Decisions and Behavioral Economics

Abstract: Organizations in crisis often fail to select the optimal crisis response strategy, preferring strategies that avoid short-term losses over the ones that offer long-term gains. This article proposes a descriptive theory of behavioral crisis communication that uses principles of behavioral economics to explain the recurrence of suboptimal anomalies found in crisis communication. Based on decision-making literature we first argue that the distinct context in which crisis communication takes place (e.g., time pressure, information overload) determines whether or not decisions are made in an analytical or an intuitive manner. Behavioral economics further allows us to explain how intuitive decisions can sometimes be biased by heuristics, which can result in the choice for a suboptimal crisis response strategy in the heat of the moment.

Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory: Marginality and Liquidities in Postcolonial Contexts

Abstract: This article centers marginal organizational actors—the disenfranchised of the Global South—to remedy their theoretical erasure and disrupt the Anglo-American grand narrative of organizational communication. This task is urgent amidst discussions of decolonization and whiteness in the discipline. We reengage Western theory on liquidity, hereby conceptualized as shape-shifting and adaptive organizing, moving like a liquid at the margins. We draw on fieldworks in Nigeria and Liberia to unearth three properties of liquidity in postcolonial contexts: motion, solvency, and permeability. Motion refers to movement, solvency refers to the ability to dissolve into one's surroundings, and permeability refers to organizing that infiltrates life and vice versa. This article bears three theoretical contributions. First, it provides a blueprint to dislodge Eurocentric biases (Anglo-American) in organizational communication theory. Second, it models what decolonizing theory may look like. Finally, it provides more complex, nuanced, and inclusive theoretical accounts of liquidities in global landscapes.

Theorizing From the Global South: Dismantling, Resisting, and Transforming Communication Theory

Abstract: This special issue explores what theory looks like from the Global South. Whether it is in the work of the women farmers organized into Sanghams under the umbrella of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) or in the organizing of farmers under the collective formations of La Via Campesina, the emergent work of theory is intrinsically tied to plural practices embedded in community life. We argue that we need to theorize from the narratives embedded in experiences of actors who are disenfranchised from metropolitan/mainstream/Euro-US/neoliberal economics and society. We mark the local politics of the Global South at the intersections of the local and global forces as sites of knowledge in this special issue.

Comparing Authoritarian Publics: The Benefits and Risks of Three Types of Publics for Autocrats

Abstract: Researchers comparing political communication across non-democratic contexts presently lack a widely acknowledged theoretical framework to guide their efforts. In order to fill in this gap, this essay develops a theoretical account that proposes comparing not authoritarian media systems, but “authoritarian publics.” Drawing on theories of the multiple public sphere, two typologies are delineated: (a) a three-fold typology of partial publics, operating within authoritarian regimes and (b) a three-fold typology of “publics-at-large,” to be distinguished across authoritarian regimes. As it is argued, the publics-at-large of authoritarian regimes can be composed of three types of partial publics: (a) uncritical, (b) policy-critical, and (c) leadership-critical publics. With reference to political science literature about the emergence of formally democratic institutions in non-democratic regimes, critical publics are interpreted as institutions that help autocrats carry out important tasks. The benefits and risks associated with critical publics for autocrats are comparable to those of other pseudo-democratic institutions.

Reporting From the Whites of Their Eyes: How Whiteness as Neoliberalism Promotes Racism in the News Coverage of “All Lives Matter”

Abstract: This study evaluates how “all lives matter” (ALM) has advanced Whiteness in the news. Critical race theory’s critique of liberalism’s embrace of race-neutral racism is applied to the journalistic practice of objectivity. Racialized reporting is considered “fair” through the race-neutral journalistic practice of objectivity that mystifies the Whiteness of the news industry. Neoliberalism, a project of liberalism, creates structural racism that impacts society and the newsroom, where regulatory changes help to vertically integrate the media market. This media oligarchy threatens democratic principles, distorts racial reality, and advances Whiteness and its supremacy. Critical discourse analysis method was used on select, major, U.S. newspapers to reveal ALM’s three discursive strategies: (a) co-optation of Black social justice work; (b) fear of Black power or “blue”/police power; and (c) equating ALM with White power. Theoretical significance reflects that Whiteness as neoliberalism owns all, is all, and flattens all differences. The recommendation for resistance is color-conscious, intersectional journalism.

The Issue Niche Theory of Nongovernmental and Nonprofit Organizations’ Interorganizational Network Ecology

Abstract: Societies are filled with numerous issues. Issues are contestable matters of concerns regarding facts, values, or policies, of which resolutions may affect social change. Some issues—such as climate change, gun rights, health care, and gender inequality—are extensively covered in the news and often become the center of public discourse and debates. Issues sometimes pose imminent threats to communities and even entire countries, and such conditions often call for the mobilization of considerable social resources and require collaborations of individuals and organizations from different social sectors and across countries.

Distributed Readiness Citizenship: A Realistic, Normative Concept for Citizens’ Public Connection

Abstract: This article argues that our view of citizens as miserably failing to maintain their role in democracy is problematic, and that the problems stem from the “informed citizen” ideal: it is too demanding, but also misses the target. The article proposes an alternative normative concept for citizens’ public connection: distributed readiness citizenship. The concept highlights how the state of being prepared to act is more important than levels of measurable political knowledge. Readiness is crucial to finding enough information and relevant cues, and it cannot be assessed based on individual citizens in isolation, but should be considered as distributed, and embodied in citizens’ social networks, with a division of labor. With such a conceptualization, we are better equipped to evaluate existing conditions, judge the impact of populism and propaganda, and figure out how to improve the chances for those less well-off to participate in democracy.

Revealing and Concealing Difference: A Critical Approach to Disclosure and an Intersectional Theory of “Closeting”

Abstract: In this essay, we integrate communication research on difference, intersectionality, queer theory, and stigma to develop a critical approach to disclosure that is attentive to power dynamics. Our critical approach to disclosure centers closeting processes in relation to multiple stigmatized, non-normative, and invisible forms of difference, in addition to sexuality/gender. The theory of closeting that we developed contributes to existing disclosure research by (a) highlighting that intersecting forms of difference impact the implications of revealing and concealing information; (b) showing that normativity heavily influences which information is assumed and, therefore, need not be disclosed; (c) establishing that stigma shapes the positive and negative impacts of revelation and concealment; (d) demonstrating that disclosure can have political purposes; and (e) linking the individual, relational, organizational, political, and cultural implications of disclosure. We conclude by discussing the implications of our theory of closeting for scholars working within multiple subfields of communication studies.

Toward Intersectional Ecofeminist Communication Studies

Abstract: After many years of sluggish engagement between environmental and feminist communication studies, scholarship in this area is gaining momentum. Ecofeminist theory informs much of the literature at this nexus. Yet what makes ecofeminist communication research timely and uniquely important within the discipline, and what core principles guide or should guide it, have not been adequately addressed. This essay covers these questions and advocates for intersectional ecofeminist communication approaches.

Post-Post-Truth: An Adaptationist Theory of Journalistic Verism

Abstract: In the age of post-truth, media studies find themselves trapped between the desire to restore journalism’s authority as a veristic (truth-seeking) institution and the lack of a coherent, applicable and consensual theory of truth. In order to develop such a theory of truth, this study bases itself on a detailed picture of how a sample of mainstream Israeli journalists covered 20 cases of factual controversies, drawing on journalists’ own accounts of their work, an independent analysis of documents they relied on, as well as their published output. Findings show that during actual situations of coverage journalists’ operative conceptions of truth match, at a minimum, the theories of coherence, correspondence and pragmatism. I argue that a novel adaptationist theory of truth may not only provide an adequate description of journalists’ actual pursuit of truth, but also contribute to their reflexivity vis-à-vis the inevitable context-dependence of their own veristic criteria.

From Correspondence to Computers: A Theory of Mediated Presence in History

Abstract: This article proposes a theory of mediated presence, defined as the sense of presence— despite physical absence—made possible by technology. Pushing the boundaries of media, the theory integrates various notions of presence at a distance: telepresence in telecommunications and computer-mediated communication, liveness in broadcasting and on the Internet, and the epistolary presence of antiquity. Theoretically, it adopts a social constructivist approach to long-term communication history, with an emphasis on technological breakdowns. The core discussion addresses three criteria for a historical, comparative analysis of mediated presence: dissemination versus dialogue, transmission-reception time lags, and levels of disembodiment. Refuting axiological and technology-centered views of history, the article concludes that increased technological options for presence at a distance have remained essentially ambivalent for users who vacillate between the need for distance and the search for connection.

Internalized Orientalism: Toward a Postcolonial Media Theory and De-Westernizing Communication Research from the Global South

Abstract: This article applies the concept of internalized orientalism to explain how news representations reflect the power struggles and power relationships within postcolonial nations of the global South through Orientalist discourses. Introducing the concept of internalized orientalism to postcolonial media studies has the potential to de-westernize communication research by depicting the interplays of representations within the South. In this article, I analyze internalized orientalism as a communication theory by studying media representations of the Egyptian revolution in terms of four themes: (a) inability of southern people to rule themselves, (b) religious versus civil state, (c) social conflicts and the patriarchal state, and (d) dehumanization of people and reducing human agency. I argue that internalized orientalism demonstrates how media representations reflect a Western production of knowledge of the global South in the global South, working toward reproducing neocolonial power. At the same time, I argue, internalized orientalism offers a lens for understanding the politics of representations and knowledge production from the South.

The Visual Citizen in a Digital News Landscape

Abstract: This article’s contribution to theory-building focuses on the everyday circumstances under which journalism encourages a civic gaze. Specifically, it elaborates our heuristic conception of the “visual citizen” to explore journalism’s mediation of a politics of seeing, paying particular attention to how and why renderings of in/visibility signify varied opportunities for civic engagement within digital news landscapes. In recognizing a distinction between direct and virtual witnessing, it establishes a conceptual basis for an inductive typology delineating interrelated, potential citizen-subject positions across a continuum. Four such positions are identified and appraised, namely the visual citizen as: (a) news observer and circulator, (b) accidental news image-maker and contributor, (c) purposeful news image-maker and activist, and (d) creative image-maker and news commentator. Evaluating these positions in relation to their significance for visual journalism, this article aims to advance efforts to rethink the inscription of imagery in news reportage and its import for public life.

Agonistic Pluralism and Journalism: De-centering Dominant Journalistic Norms

Abstract: In this article I apply a poststructuralist perspective to journalism. I argue that Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism provides a powerful theoretical site from which to critically analyze dominant forms of journalistic professionalism, their relationship to race, ethnicity and ethnic media, and the ways they shape expectations of the role of journalism in democratic society. There are two main themes in this analysis. In the first instance, the post-structuralist approach insists on seeing current professional journalistic norms as examples of hegemonic discursive formations that achieve ascendancy over other options. Through this perspective, one can interrogate how ethnic media and journalism are excluded from democratic public debates on the basis of contingent communicative values dressed up as objective norms. Secondly, Mouffe’s work provides a theoretical basis for aligning journalistic contingency with a plural agonistic democracy. The article also will discuss several challenges that arise when applying agonistic pluralism to media.

The Imperialism of Categories: Concepts and Contexts in Communication for Social Change

Abstract: This article is a critique of communication and social change (CSC) theory. It makes a case for re-centring context in theory and practice and for appropriate uses of categories and concepts to the making sense of of situations in the developing world. Based on fieldwork with an indigenous community in South India, the Irulas, the article explores their very specific context on the margins of globalising India and their experience with access to and use of laptops provided by the State government. It argues that David Harvey’s concept ‘Accumulation by Dispossession’ (ABD) ‘travels well’ and can be used to make sense of the contexts of the precariat and in particular, communities such as the Irulas. Based on conversations with theory in CSC it makes a strong case for the need for textured understandings of cultural and social contexts as the basis for CSC interventions.

Sustainability, Ecology, and Agriculture in Women Farmers’ Voices: Culture-Centering Gender and Development

Abstract: The neoliberal/neocolonial transformation of agriculture in the global South is achieved through the hegemony of expert-led interventions of privatization that erase the knowledge of agricultural practices held by subaltern communities. Neocolonial development interventions serve the privatizing logics of agro-capital through the circulation of logics of profits, efficiency, and growth through both paid and state-controlled communication channels. In this backdrop, our ethnographic description of a culture-centered intervention carried out in solidarity with dalit, women farmers organized under the umbrella of sanghams (cooperatives) points toward communication sovereignty as a theoretical anchor for re-imagining the relationships among ecology, agriculture, and sustainability in resistance to capitalist agriculture. Challenging hegemonic models of participatory engagement put forth by neocolonial structures of development, the concept of communicative justice inverts listening, radically placing power in the hands of subaltern communities. Layers of inequalities from households to community spaces to market structures are disrupted through the voices of dalit women farmers and their participation in practices that materially resist capitalist agriculture. Moreover, the co-creative work of generating theory from within subaltern struggles for sovereignty in the global South dislocates the colonial nature of abs/ex-tractive theorizing in the metropole in the North, situating the work of theorizing amidst the lifeworlds of subaltern communities performing everyday transformative practices that dismantle capitalist logics.

Communication and (Un)Inspired Terror: Toward a Theory of Phatic Violence

Abstract: Terrorism has long been theorized as a communicative act. Absent in the array of theories is an adequate consideration of violence committed by third parties (e.g., lone wolves), individuals with no clear link to any group. Often, this complex mediated phenomenon is reduced to the “inspired” reproduction/transmission of a message. For a more nuanced understanding, I develop a theory of phatic violence centered on relation/mediation rather than information/intentionality. The violence of the ambiguous third party, in the first instance, produces a phatic exigency through which bonds might be created or sustained. Any subsequent communion (or its denial) with a group is the result of a mediated ritual process, one that is structured by and regenerates the bonds of antipathy that define the war on terror. Forefronting antipathy in phatic communication enables new understandings of dispersed violence and the horror of the war on terror.

The Mediatization of Human Rights Memory in Chile

Abstract: The current pandemic-imposed reliance on media-centered forms of civic engagement underscores the need for empirical mediatization research on the relationship between media, partisan conflict, and political culture. Drawing from critical Latin American media scholarship, mediatization theory, and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), this article proposes a framework for comparative political communication research that centers on media practices and sociocultural change. By analyzing how a 1988 political advertising campaign in dictatorial Chile instantiated a peculiar vision of democratic transition, this article provides an examination of the disjuncture between televised representations of cheerful political reconciliation and abominable human rights abuses as the initial stage in the mediatization of Chilean human rights memory (HRM).

Theorizing Dependency Relations in Small Media

Abstract: The paper questions the pervasive western intellectual universalism which disregards Global South imaginations for generalized approaches. Using field data from Uganda about Community Audio Towers (CATs), the western-generated community media theory is interrogated, accentuating its failure to account for the intricate relationship between the individual, society, and small media. To cover the gap, the Small Media System Dependency theory is herein introduced as a geocultural response to lack of theory from the South.